US Supreme Court maintains block on Trump deportations under wartime law

The US Supreme Court on Friday kept in place its block on President Donald Trump's deportations of Venezuelan migrants under a 1798 law historically used only in wartime, faulting his administration for seeking to remove them without adequate legal process.

The justices, in a brief and unsigned opinion, granted a request by American Civil Liberties Union attorneys representing the migrants to maintain the halt on the removals for now. The court on April 19 had ordered a temporary stop to the administration's deportations of dozens of migrants being held at a detention center in Texas.

Trump's deportations are part of the Republican president's immigration crackdown since he returned to office in January.

ACLU lawyers had asked the Supreme Court to intervene after they reported on Apr 18 that the administration was set to imminently remove the migrants without the required notice or opportunity to contest the removals.

The justices on Friday agreed.

"Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster," the court wrote in its ruling.

Due process generally requires the government to provide notice and an opportunity for a hearing before taking certain adverse actions.

Trump criticised the Supreme Court's action, writing on social media, "This is a bad and dangerous day for America!"

The president lamented that under the ruling illegal immigrants who he said have committed crimes "are not allowed to be forced out without going through a long, protracted, and expensive Legal Process" that could take years. The ruling, Trump added, also will encourage other criminals to enter the country illegally.

Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly dissented from Friday's decision. Alito wrote in an opinion that he did not think the Supreme Court had the power to weigh in at this stage of the case and questioned whether providing relief to the detainees as a group was legal.

The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, ordered the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles cases arising from Texas, to determine the procedures that must be accorded to the migrants "to satisfy the Constitution in this case."

The Supreme court, meanwhile, clarified that the administration was free to pursue deportations under other provisions of US immigration law.

The interests of the detainees in the case were "particularly weighty" given the Trump administration's claim in a separate case that it is unable to return to the United States a Salvadoran man who had lived in Maryland and was erroneously deported to El Salvador, Friday's ruling said.

'A POWERFUL REBUKE'

Lee Gelernt, the ACLU's lead lawyer in the case, welcomed the ruling.

"The court's decision to stay removals is a powerful rebuke to the government's attempt to hurry people away to a Gulag-type prison in El Salvador. The use of a wartime authority during peacetime, without even affording due process, raises issues of profound importance," Gelernt said.

The administration has sent deportees to El Salvador, where they are being detained in the country's maximum-security anti-terrorism prison under a deal in which the United States is paying President Nayib Bukele's government $6 million.

The administration has accused the migrants of being members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang originating in Venezuelan prisons that the State Department has designated as a foreign terrorist organisation. Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act in a bid to swiftly deport them.

Relatives of many of the hundreds of deported Venezuelans and their lawyers have denied that they are Tren de Aragua members and have said they were never given the chance to contest the administration's allegations of gang affiliation.

The Alien Enemies Act authorises the president to deport, detain or place restrictions on individuals whose primary allegiance is to a foreign power and who might pose a national security risk in wartime. The US government last invoked the Alien Enemies Act during World War Two to intern and deport people of Japanese, German and Italian descent.

This was the second time that Trump's actions concerning Venezuelan migrants had come before the Supreme Court in a legal dispute that has raised questions about his administration's willingness to comply with limits set by the nation's highest judicial body.

Lawyers for the migrants said that administration officials had not provided the migrants held at the Bluebonnet immigration detention facility the opportunity for judicial review to contest the removals to a prison in El Salvador before many were loaded on buses headed to the airport -- in violation of a prior order by the justices.

The Supreme Court on Apr 7 had placed limits on how deportations under the Alien Enemies Act may occur even as the legality of that law's use for this purpose is being contested. The justices required that detainees receive notice "within a reasonable time and in such a manner" to challenge the legality of their removal.